SCARY ART: THE NIGHTMARE

SCARY ART - THE NIGHTMARE!!! 18 x 24 inch Screen Prints $30

THE NIGHTMARE...

The NIGHTMARE! A
strange cerebral monstrous mutation invades the dream state. The
faces, thoughts, fears, screams and desires cross the collective
unconscious melting and morphing into a psychedelic web of terror.
The nightmare exposes the telepathic collection that hides deep
within our minds. The masks peel away revealing an apocalyptic
horror, removing the individual and replacing our so called reality
with a hideous, amorphous release. Eyes, mouths, limbs, skins and
bones stretch and twist into each other like an oozing mess as we
slowing drift into the globular otherness and learn to accept the
nightmare...

I first started
exploring this type of imagery a few years ago while making my series
of “Surreal Comics”. At that time I had just finished working as
a full time street art performer and really wanted to get away from
the cityscape, crowd scenes that had dominated my public artworks.
Although a lot of my street art depicts insane monsters and a certain
degree of cartoon violence there was a deliberate humour and
playfulness to the work as it was intended for audiences of all ages.
Having returned to the privacy of the studio I suddenly had an urge
to relinquish that side of my work and create some more horrific,
Lovecraftian and personal artworks. These nightmare shapes appeared
in a few of my darker webcomics around 2008-09 before disappearing
for a while.

It was during a
comic convention in the early winter of 2014 that I decided to
re-visit these hideous abstractions. I made 4 or 5 smaller versions
of the Nightmare while sitting in the artists alley at the Toronto
Comic-Con. The drawings were well received by the audience and it
felt really cathartic to once again escape the meticulously detailed
city scape drawings again to work on something more free and
frightening. Following the convention I spent a few days creating the
larger version. The full size nightmare was 26 inches x 40 inches and
drawn with pen and ink on paper and has been reproduced as an 18 inch
x 24 inch screen print.

SCARY ART -INFLUENCE AND PHOBIA

Although a lot of my
artwork appears to be a combination of abstract illustration with
alternative and mainstream western comic books my secret real passion
has always been weird tales, horror movies and dark manga. However I
am not talking about slasher films or your typical monster movies but
the really cerebral stuff like David Cronenberg (whose body horror
influence is certainly apparent in these works), Kubrick's “The
Shining” the world of Shinya Tsukamoto and some Takeshi Miike (when
he is Ichi the Killer/Audition/Imprint evil). There are also a number
of intense dark manga out there that take the themes and madness of
horror to a whole new level. Artists like Suehiro Maruo, Hideo
Yamamoto and Junji Ito are highly recommended if your are looking for
some scary art. Another big influence on my work is the weird tale,
whether it be a Poe or Lovecraft yarn, EC Comics or an episode of the
Nightgallery,Kolchak or Tales from the Crypt I can never get enough of scary stories.